Copy data management with AppSync for applications running on Dell EMC PowerFlex
Mon, 21 Jun 2021 10:42:34 -0000
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Dell EMC PowerFlex, a premier software-defined platform for your mission-critical workloads, empowers organizations to move faster and respond effectively to rapidly changing business needs. PowerFlex provides unprecedented freedom to deploy and scale critical workloads that drive your business, while ensuring exceptional performance, simplicity, and manageability.
As the world of DevOps evolves, agility in IT operations is critical in order to rapidly provision environments for test and development. This agility requires a platform which includes integrated copy data management for DevOps environments.
The PowerFlex software-defined storage solution enables this transformational agility for organizations looking to modernize their DevOps application development operation and empowers organizations to move faster and respond more effectively to rapidly changing business needs.
Dell EMC AppSync for PowerFlex provides a single user interface that simplifies, orchestrates and automates the process of generating and consuming DevOps data across all enterprise database applications deployed on PowerFlex.
AppSync for PowerFlex provides simple automated copy creation and consumption, eliminating manual steps or custom scripts. AppSync integrates tightly with host environments and database applications including, but not limited to, Oracle and SQL Server. With AppSync, applications owners, database administrators, and storage administrators get on - and stay on - the same page through a transparent copy workflow.
Dell EMC AppSync for PowerFlex allows you to protect, restore and repurpose application data, satisfying any DevOps requirements.
AppSync version 4.3 enables support for the PowerFlex family - rack, appliance and ready node consumption options.
AppSync architecture
The architecture of AppSync has three major components:
- AppSync server is deployed on a Windows server system, either physical or virtual. It controls all workflow activities, manages the alerting and monitoring aspects, and persists internal data in a PostgreSQL database.
- AppSync host plug-ins are installed on all source and mount hosts. They provide integration with the operating systems and the applications that are hosted on the hosts. These applications include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server®, Oracle®, SAP HANA, and VMware datastores or other file systems. With VMware datastore replication, there is no host plug-in because AppSync communicates directly with the VMware vCenter® server.
- AppSync user interface is the web-based UI for the AppSync copy-management feature. AppSync can also be managed using the vSphere VSI plug-in, REST API, or command-line interface (CLI).
Registering the PowerFlex system with AppSync
AppSync interacts with the PowerFlex system by communicating with PowerFlex Gateway using API calls:
1. On the AppSync console, select Settings > Infrastructure Resources > STORAGE SYSTEMS. Click ADD SYSTEMS.
2. Under Select System Type, choose PowerFlex.
3. Enter the PowerFlex Gateway IP and credentials to configure the storage system.
4. Review the configurations in the Summary page and click FINISH to register the PowerFlex system.
AppSync service plans
AppSync provides intuitive workflows to set up protection and repurposing jobs (called Service Plans) that provide end-to-end automation of all the steps from application discovery and storage mapping to mounting copies to the target hosts. Service plans can be scheduled with alert emails to easily track their status. AppSync also provides an application protection monitoring and reporting service that generates alerts if SLAs are not met or if a service plan fails.
AppSync supports three types of service plans:
- Bronze — You can use the Bronze service plan to create local copies of your applications data
- Silver — You can use the Silver service plan to create remote copies of your applications data
- Gold — You can use the Gold service plan to create both local and remote copies of your applications data
AppSync features
- AppSync Protect
AppSync enables application owners and DBAs to protect, restore. and repurpose their data to satisfy their unique copy requirements. This accelerates and improves processes like test and dev by providing the latest production data for high quality product releases. AppSync’s support for second generation copies (a copy of a copy) allows for required data masking, filtering and obfuscation by DBAs so that end-users of data have access to only the data that they need. At any given point of time, storage admins can get a complete picture of the copy landscape so that they are aware of capacity utilization and the scope for optimization.
- AppSync repurposing
AppSync allows you to create copies of your database and file systems for application testing and validation, test and development, reporting, data masking, and data analytics. AppSync identifies copies that are created from a repurpose action as first-generation and second-generation copies. The source of a second-generation copy is a first-generation copy. You can create multiple second-generation copies from a first-generation copy.
AppSync support for PowerFlex
- PowerFlex 3.0.1 and above
- Bronze & Silver service plan
AppSync integration with PowerFlex videos
- Dell EMC PowerFlex and AppSync integration
- Integrated copy data management with AppSync for SQL Server running on Dell EMC PowerFlex
- Integrated copy data management with AppSync for Oracle running on Dell EMC PowerFlex
- Integrated copy data management with AppSync for File Systems running on Dell EMC PowerFlex
Conclusion
AppSync integration enables PowerFlex users to protect, restore and repurpose their data to satisfy their unique copy requirements for their enterprise applications users.
References
- Dell EMC Support Page
https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19?app=products&~ck=mn
- Dell EMC AppSync Copy Data Management Software
https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/storage/appsync-copy-data-management-software.htm
- AppSync Licensing Guide
Related Blog Posts
Deploying Tanzu Application Services on Dell EMC PowerFlex
Tue, 15 Dec 2020 14:35:58 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Introduction
Tanzu Application Service (TAS) architecture provides the best approach available today to enable agility at scale with the reliability that is must to address these challenges. PowerFlex family offers key value propositions of traditional and cloud-native production workloads, deployment flexibility, linear scalability, predictable high performance, and enterprise-grade resilience.
Tanzu Application Service (TAS)
The VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) is based on Cloud Foundry –an open-source cloud application platform that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Cloud Foundry is a multi-cloud platform for the deployment, management, and continuous delivery of applications, containers, and functions. TAS abstracts away the process of setting up and managing an application runtime environment so that developers can focus solely on their applications and associated data. Running a single command—cf push—creates a scalable environment for your application in seconds, which might otherwise take hours to spin up manually. TAS allows developers to deploy and deliver software quickly, without the need of managing the underlying infrastructure.
PowerFlex
PowerFlex (previously VxFlex OS) is the software foundation of PowerFlex software-defined storage. It is a unified compute, storage and networking solution delivering scale-out block storage service designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable high performance and resiliency at scale.
The PowerFlex platform is available in multiple consumption options to help customers meet their project and data center requirements. PowerFlex appliance and PowerFlex rack provide customers comprehensive IT Operations Management (ITOM) and life cycle management (LCM) of the entire infrastructure stack in addition to sophisticated high-performance, scalable, resilient storage services. PowerFlex appliance and PowerFlex rack are the two preferred and proactively marketed consumption options. PowerFlex is also available on VxFlex Ready Nodes for those customers interested in software-defined compliant hardware without the ITOM and LCM capabilities.
PowerFlex software-define storage with unified compute and networking offers flexibility of deployment architecture to help best meet the specific deployment and architectural requirements. PowerFlex can be deployed in a two-layer for asymmetrical scaling of compute and storage for “right-sizing capacities, single-layer (HCI), or in mixed architecture.
Deploying TAS on PowerFlex
For this example, a PowerFlex production cluster is set up using a Hyperconverged configuration. The production cluster has connectivity to the customer-data network and the private backend PowerFlex storage network. The PowerFlex production cluster consists of a minimum of four servers that host the workload and PowerFlex storage VMs. All the nodes are part of a single ESXi Cluster and part of the same PowerFlex Cluster. Each node contributes all their internal disk resources to PowerFlex cluster.
The PowerFlex management software manages the capacity of all of the disks and acts as a back-end for data access by presenting storage volumes to be consumed by the applications running on the nodes. PowerFlex Manager also provides the essential operational controls and lifecycle management tools. The production cluster hosts the compute nodes that are used for deployment of TAS VMs. TAS components are deployed across three dedicated compute clusters that are designated as three availability zones. These compute clusters are managed by the same 'compute workload' vCenter as the dedicated Edge cluster. The following figure depicts the layout in the lab environment:
Figure 1. PowerFlex production cluster
The compute infrastructure illustrates the best practice architecture using 3 AZ’s using PowerFlex rack in hyperconverged configured nodes. This design ensures the high availability of nodes (i.e., nodes in AZ1 will still function if AZ2 or AZ3 goes down). A dedicated compute cluster in each AZ’s combines to form Isolation Zone (IZ). These AZ’s can be used to deploy and run the TAS stateful workloads requiring persistent storage. On the PowerFlex storage we have created volumes in the backend which are being mapped to vSphere as Datastores.
PowerFlex storage distributed data layout scheme is designed to maximize protection and optimize performance. A single volume is divided into chunks. These chunks will be distributed (striped) on physical disks throughout the cluster, in a balanced and random manner. Each chunk has a total of two copies for redundancy.
PowerFlex can be feature configured optionally to achieve additional data redundancy by enabling the feature Fault sets. Persistent Storage for each AZ could be its own PowerFlex cluster. By implementing PowerFlex feature Fault sets we can ensure that the persistent data availability all time. Fault Sets are subgroup of SDS s (Software defined Storage) installed on host servers within a Protection Domain. PowerFlex OS will mirror data for a Fault Set on SDSs that are outside the Fault Set. Thus, availability is assured even if all the servers within one Fault Set fail simultaneously.
PowerFlex enables flexible scale out capabilities for your data center also provides unparalleled elasticity and scalability. Start with a small environment for your proof of concept or a new application and add nodes as needed when requirements evolve.
The solution mentioned in this blog provides recommendations for deploying a highly available and production-ready Tanzu Application Service on Dell EMC PowerFlex rack infrastructure platform to meet the performance, scalability, resiliency, and availability requirements and describes its hardware and software components. For complete information, see Tanzu Application Services on PowerFlex rack - Solution Guide.